I'm a bird uneducated on the topic, but what sort of target identification is possible on a SBC? Are these drones just looking for a object of sufficient size of a specific color? This seems like a part of this design that is important.
Zig Forums designs weapons
Luis Flores
Brody Gray
That depends on what kind of sensors you include.
An SBC is just a very small and cheap computer, you could use one to replace a desktop in most applications like word processing or web surfing. They're not so great at running modern AAA games but they can be used to look for specific shapes.
You'd probably want to set it to scan for a colored dot pulsing at a specific frequency and then just paint a target to make sure it only goes after what you've designated. Alternatively, you could use accelerometers and dead reckoning, or some other method. There really isn't one correct answer, the right guidance system depends on the intended role.
Luis Lopez
Flitetest.com
I would definitely go with full length flaperons. That thing could be built for like 50 dollars,less if you bought the electronics in bulk. Shit is so cheap now even with cameras and gps, get some glow engines or find a target within 50 - 60 miles.
Side note, more people should get into rc planes and drones. It is cheap and fun. You don't have to buy a dji, it's way more rewarding to build your own.
John Powell
Since these already will have a camera on these, I think that will be the main final target designator. I imagine that the paint marking the landing strip is unique enough that the SBC can recognize it. Given these things are built with a gps or solar navigation, these are meant for non line of sight use acting semi autonomously. You are very right, though. Programming would be the final step of designing this thing. I haven't been able to find any videos of lifting body rc planes of this sort of proportion, and I don't know enough about aerodynamics to determine its viability. Is there any past designs as rectangular as this thing?
Ayden Ramirez
It would improve accuracy, but not by such a magnitude. You're looking at improvements from 5 mile radius to 1 mile radius. That's because inertial systems drift (each reading produces small but persistent error and it accumulates) and practical devices drift very fast - typical consumer MEMS accelerometer can drift by as much as 0.5 m/s^2. You can do better if you use GPS but you can take it for granted that in a serious conflict this service wouldn't be available, not directly in vicinity of your targets anyway. It's also pretty obvious that your biggest problem is wind and you just can't sidestep it, you can't take any sort of reliable measurement in all points along the path of the projectile, hell you'd be lucky if you get any wind readings at the target ground level, you'd usually only have launch site wind readings. So if there's no wind then there's no problem, but even small winds can blow your missiles away a very significant distance.
Yep. Bullets would make tiny neat holes in it but beyond that they'd do diddly squat. You'd need to put hundreds of bullets through it before it even approaches the point where its aerodynamics significantly deteriorate, nevermind actual point of wing disintegration.
These drones are not intended to fly under 500m altitude, you'd be lucky if a single pellet could connect at that distance, but they wouldn't even fly up that high to begin with.
At that distance it's the same as getting hit directly by a 30mm shell (not nearly the same energy but just in terms of blunt damage). Which of course such drone is not intended to survive.
500 miles worth of batteries will set you back nearly 500 bucks, that's bulk of the cost.
I would give it neural network image recognition primed to recognize general ship shapes from all appropriate angles, then a simple navigation program can do the piloting and aiming. Doing this using computer vision and preprogrammed patterns is too unreliable, the enemy can dazzle-paint the ship overnight and instantly defeat all of your missiles, which'll take a lot of time to reprogram.
There really is no magic juju to making wings. A sheet of plywood can produce lift if you give it a little bit of attack angle, it's just it would also produce a lot of extra drag and will have very high stall speed. Teardrop shape simply reduces the drag, it has nothing to do with generating lift or any other aerodynamics. Lift is generated from attack angle and attack angle alone, this is why fighters use elongated symmetrical teardrop wings. Chorded wings have gradually increasing attack angle to increase lift at low speeds for a given wing area, which due to laminar drag makes it more efficient than having larger wings. And as I said earlier, plain straight wings work just fine at low speeds, they're usually tapered to reduce wingtip flexion (since it generates less lift). Swept wings help in near transsonic speeds because they increase the speed at which shockwaves form around the airfoil (air is accelerated while it passes around so it can go supersonic even if the aircraft goes subsonic). Delta wings use similar concept except they're better than swept wings at low speeds. The hard part about designing an airplane is making it as lightweight as possible for the given specs, all the aerodynamic features you see are just the result of relentless autism over perfecting the performance, if you don't care very much about having highest possible efficiency then you can just make flying bricks.
Adrian Perry
The most effective if you can weaponize….Influenza
Alexander Davis
Pistol bullets definitely don't do crap to styrofoam, I'm pretty sure it's the same story with intermediate cartridges. I'd also like to point out that my idea of a styrofoam wing was to make it 1x2 meter in size and 15 cm in thickness at the crest, so it probably wouldn't immediately disintegrate like that styrofoam glider
Justin Jackson
I'm just saying that tanks, most long-range guided missiles, etc. Rely on a fiberoptic gyroscope for distance calculation and they adjust for wind just fine, bro.
Jordan Brooks
They really don't. Submarines have the top grade accelerometers and compensation algorithms and even those drift by several dozen miles per day. Something moving as violently as a missile will also have its inertial guidance system drift violently. They wouldn't have had created GPS if they could navigate by inertial instruments alone.
Henry Johnson
Submarines don't use the same accelerometers as missile systems, move underwater, and move in slow increments that would throw off an accelerometer. It's different math, so I don't think that's a fair comparison.